A Polaroid of Peggy Read online

  He released my hand and leant back in his chair, with a smug look on his face as if he were personally responsible for my good fortune. I opened the folded post-it note. £4,680,000 was written in his careful hand.

  “Crikey!” I said, “Really.”

  “Give or take.”

  “Give or take?”

  “Yes,” said Frank, breaking into a huge grin. “Depends on how much you give and she takes.”

  Well, if his jokes had been original he wouldn’t have been a bean counter.

  *

  That’s right. Four and a half and change. Oodathunkit. Little Andrew Williams, yeah, Mavis and Sid’s boy, hasn’t he done well? I fairly bounced back up the stone steps which led into Hardy Wiggins.

  But, curiously, perhaps because she was jaded by the value of the back catalogues of superannuated pop stars, Harriet Braintree did not seem that impressed.

  “Yes, Andrew, I know it sounds like a lot – and, please do not misunderstand me, I am not for one moment suggesting it is not a considerable sum, but you’d be amazed at how a divorce – if not properly handled – can, well, can cause a fortune to dwindle. There are all sorts of things to take into account. To begin with, there’s CGT.”

  CGT! Of course. How could I have been so stupid as to forget it? Possibly because I had no idea what it was. Some sort of sports car perhaps? A modern variation on a drink before dinner? But I didn’t have to ask for an explanation because Harriet took my ignorance for granted.

  “Capital Gains Tax. Won’t be enormous, you’ve had the company for ten years, so you’ll get the full taper relief.”

  Full taper relief? Sounded depressingly sleazy or rather appealing depending on your point of view.

  “You’ll still have to pay about ten per cent on any profit you’ve made, which I’m guessing will be most of that. So, that’s going to be somewhere around the four hundred thou mark.”

  Four hundred thou! Not enormous? Not exactly a handful of coppers either. Still, I reasoned, it could be worse.

  Which it soon was.

  “And then, there is the little matter of the original partners’ agreement.”

  Now what was she on about?

  “You don’t remember? Gosh, you artistic types are all the same.” I presumed this was an attempt to bracket me with the superannuated pop star. I wasn’t sure whether I should be flattered or insulted. “You see, according to what I’ve seen, there was a clause in your original agreement that none of the founding partners could sell their shares on to a third party without the written agreement of the others.”

  “Oh. Is that bad?”

  Harriet snuck a look at me over her half-moons which suggested that she may have been doing the superannuated pop star a disservice.

  “Well, realising your asset – getting your money out – might not be straightforward. But let’s cross that bridge when we come to it – hmm?”

  Something very unpleasant had just hoved into view.

  “Do you mean that me laying my hands on what is rightfully mine depends on the say so of Geoff Bradley and Vince Dutton?”

  “Technically, yes, it may, but I do have my doubts that an agreement like that would stand up in court. Still, court is a place we’d prefer not to go, Andrew.”

  We moved on to the rest of my stuff. The bottom line was this; I had my house, then worth about £800,000 – today goodness only knows, I only know I couldn’t afford to buy it – except that it wasn’t my house, it was ours. Ours being Alison’s and mine in about equal part, say a quarter each, and the Woolwich Building Society’s who were in for around half. Then there were the contents – again split between Alison and me – and worth about sixty thousand, top whack. I had some shares and investments outside of BWD, maybe worth four hundred thou on a good day. Then came the barrel scrapings such as the nanny’s second hand VW – the Porsche and the Jeep were both owned, or rather leased, by the company.

  My basic salary at BWD was – yes, a fair screw I won’t deny – one fifty at the time, and, on top of that, dividends from my company shares, had, last year, been the same again. So that was three hundred. Yes, yes, I know, very nice work if you can get it. Well, I’m not going to try to justify it because you can’t, and isn’t it terrible about the poor nurses, and I’m sure that if I hadn’t had the luck I’d had, I’d be wearing a bandana and chanting revolutionary slogans and lining up at the front of the barricades to lob a Molotov cocktails at the likes of me. (No, of course I wouldn’t, I’d be right behind the guys lobbing the Molotov cocktails and making jolly sure I didn’t get caught.)

  Anyway, it was what it was. And when you looked at everything together surely it wasn’t at all that bad? Wait a mo, it was even better than that. Almost forgot to mention my pension. There was six hundred thousand plus in that. Harriet Braintree, however, was a hard one to please.

  “You see, Andrew,” she said, “it looks like quite a bit, and on top of that we have to take account of whatever Alison has to throw in the pot, but the bulk of it, much the greatest part, is tied up in the company. And your pension almost counts against you, because it will be included in your overall worth, but you can’t get at it, until you’re old enough to take it, can you? And yes, your income is nothing to sneeze at, but goodness knows, so are your outgoings, you’ve only got to think about Florence and India’s school and uni fees for the next however many years, and all the maintenance there’ll be—” (yes, thank you, Harriet, as if I needed reminding) “—so, well, what I would say is, despite the success of your firm, and really, well done on that, I never knew advertising was such a wonderful business, I really would be thinking about cutting your cloth, if you know what I mean.”

  I gave a grim smile to confirm I knew what she meant.

  “Oh and Andrew, before you leave, I think Colin has your account ready. Much less painful to settle things little by little, I always think.”

  Not that much less painful, I thought, not at four fifty an hour.

  When I left Hardy Wiggins the boing in my bounce had all but gone.

  *

  I wandered around the flat looking at … I didn’t quite know what. I’d taken it all in in about the first ten seconds but had the idea that protocol demanded I seem to make a more thorough examination. I opened and closed a few kitchen cupboards and pretended to check out the central heating controls.

  “Bit of work and it’ll look like a pretty good deal,” said the young estate agent showing me round. “New carpets, lick of paint. All the basics are here.”

  All the basics were three bedrooms – one really far too small – plus bath, kitch, recep. It would just about do, it was in Bayswater which was close enough to the house and the girls school, and they were asking two seventy-five which, it seemed, was about manageable. If you’re wondering how a man with a cool four million and a bit share in an advertising agency could only just manage two seventy-five, so was I, but that was what my accountant – who had already been twice divorced himself – was telling me. (His piece of divorce advice was, “Remember the bad times, Andrew, remember the bad times.”)

  Once the solicitors had got involved, the pace of the divorce had picked up. It just seemed sensible to get it over with. I could have hung about New Pemberley for a bit longer but it was no fun trying to maneouvre your way past your wife – as was – as would soon officially not be – on the stairs without touching. Not that I wanted to touch her, any more than I suppose she wanted to touch me, but the deliberate avoidance just pointed up all that we no longer were to each other.

  It was clear that Alison was going to get the house – there was no way I was going to push the girls out of the only home they could remember – so that meant I had to go. I thought about renting but couldn’t see the point. I suppose I could have taken a bit more trouble, seen a few more places, but whatever I had been shown would have looked pretty shitty compared to
what I was leaving, and besides, I just wasn’t in the mood for enthusiastic house hunting. So, I offered two five five, got it for two sixty, and one windy midweek day in October – there was no way I was going to manage this without some serious caterwauling if the kids weren’t out of the way at school – I lugged a couple of suitcases of clothes and a few books and whatnots stuffed into a cardboard box down the steps and waved goodbye to Anneke, who choked back a tear and very nearly set me off too.

  But heigh ho, onward and upward, one door shuts – well that’s what you try to tell yourself, because really, what the fuck else is there to say?

  *

  Mooneys – no, not the cult, different spelling – had their London office in one of those faceless little streets around Holborn. (Handy for all the solicitors clustered around the nearby Inns of Court, I suppose.) They occupied the top two floors of a building above a shop that sold umbrellas. I pressed the buzzer by the brass plaque on which their name was inscribed, the door clicked open and up the winding, lino’d stairs I climbed. Mooney’s was an American outfit, not as big as Pinkerton’s, but they had this branch office in London, and Harriet Braintree, had, via a couple of intermediaries – dealing with people like this was far, far beneath her – pointed me in their direction. She hadn’t known quite what to make of my original enquiry – “Private investigators? Surely, we know all we need to about your wife’s er – activities” – and I really couldn’t be bothered to properly enlighten her. I just gave her the bare bones: said it was nothing to do with Alison, but that I was just trying to trace a missing person and I thought she might know someone. I hadn’t known quite what a private investigator’s would look like – probably expected something like one of those places you see in forties films with S. Spade or P. Marlowe etched on a glass door – but it turned out to be grey carpet tiles and tired pot plants and anonymous wooden laminated desks, modern and dead, the sort of look that BWD might have had if Frank Connor had been in charge of the design.

  My appointment was with someone called Keith Lyons, who turned out to be a balding, paunchy chap, an ex-Met D.I. he told me – I immediately decided he’d probably never made it higher than sergeant – doubtless getting one of those bloated police pensions that I’d read about – and whose most notable feature was that he supported his weight on his knees on one of those funny ergonomic chairs with no back.

  “Slipped disc,” he offered by way of explanation. “It’s a bastard.”

  By 1999, I had long since given up smoking and almost everyone I knew had too, but Keith Lyons was still keeping the flag flying for the terminally stupid, and we went through the usual palaver of him offering me one, me refusing, him saying ‘Mind if I do?’ and me lying that I didn’t. Eventually, after he’d got a good couple of lungfuls of carcinogens down him, he turned to the business at hand.

  “So tell me what you know about this person. Let’s start with the basics.

  Name?”

  “Um, Lee.”

  “First name or last name.”

  “Oh, last name.”

  He wrote Lee down on a form.

  “First name?”

  “Ahah, well there you have it.”

  “Sorry?”

  “Well, she’s known as Peggy.”

  Before I could stop him, he’d written Peggy down on the form. Then looked up, frowning. Something had just dawned on him.

  “What? Peggy Lee? The singer? She shouldn’t be too hard to find.”

  “Er, no, not that Peggy Lee. This is another Peggy Lee. And that’s just a nickname.”

  “Ok – ay. And her real name is?”

  “Er, Brenda.”

  “Brenda? Brenda Lee? Like Brenda Lee – the other singer?”

  “Yes.”

  “But not that Brenda Lee, am I right?”

  “No. I mean yes, not that Brenda Lee.”

  “Ok-ay.” He stubbed the cigarette out, and crossed out Peggy and put Brenda.

  “Only, that may not be her name either.”

  “Sorry?”

  “Well, it’s a bit complicated. She told me Brenda was her real name but I think she may not have wanted me to know.”

  He laid his Bic on his desk, breathed out, and leaned back. I winced because he’d clearly forgotten he was in an ergonomic chair without anything to support him from behind. He’d got to the critical point where he was about to topple on to the floor, when, with a supreme effort, he managed, with the use of his core muscles, and a bit of urgent arm whirling, to halt the momentum and force himself forwards again. Can’t have done his slipped disc any good at all. Having survived this crisis, he lit another cigarette. (A Piccadilly tipped, I noticed; hadn’t seen one of those since they built Stonehenge.)

  “Forgive me, Mr Williams—”

  “Please call me Andrew.”

  “Er, very well, Andrew. So, she didn’t want you to know her name. What makes you think she’d want to be found by you now?”

  “Well, yes, someone else asked me something similar.”

  “Sorry?”

  I was about to mention Donald McEwan’s doubts when I thought better of it. I wasn’t sure that an ex-Met detective would read the right things into me seeing a shrink.

  “I’m just sure that she would.”

  “Alright then. Let’s move on.”

  We then covered what my relationship with her had been – blood relative, no – husband, no – boyfriend, just about – and how long it had been since I had last seen her.

  “Twenty years.”

  “Any contact since?”

  “No.”

  “Do you have an address?”

  “Do you mean postal or e-mail?”

  He raised his eyebrows, implying, I thought, something along the lines of, ooh, I say, get you, very up to date.

  “Okay then. Postal?”

  “No.”

  “E-mail?”

  “No.”

  Another, even more drawn out ok-ay, this time stretching it to another syllable: ok-ay-ee. And another Piccadilly tipped.

  “Telephone number?”

  “No.”

  “Mr Williams – sorry Andrew – is there anything you know about this lady, apart from the fact that her name is Lee?”

  “Well—” I began, and then went through the list of enquiries I made myself, the fruitless enquiries at McConnell Martin, New Rochelle Information, the Temple Israel Synagogue, all that I had done until my search had run into the sand.

  I looked up at him with spaniel eyes.

  “So that’s why I’ve come to you.”

  He leaned forward on his ergonomic chair – he wasn’t going to make the mistake of going backwards again – and said, as sympathetically, I think, as he could:

  “Look, Andrew, I can see you’ve got a bit of a bee in your bonnet about this lady,” – a horrible feeling came over me when he said those words but I couldn’t work out why – “but it’s not a lot to go on, it really isn’t.”

  He was obviously tempted to draw a line under things here but seeing my crestfallen face – or possibly the prospect of a few days fees slipping unnecessarily away – he said,

  “Alright, let’s try again. No point in asking you if you know her social security number I suppose?”

  I shook my head. No, no point, not when—

  “What about her date of birth?”

  Not when I didn’t even know that. I shook my head again. The best I could do was,

  “I think her birthday’s in February. She was an Aquarius, I remember that, I’m a Sagittarius and we definitely discussed that. But she never had a birthday when I was with her you see. And she was two years younger than me, so that would make her date of birth, the year I mean – fifty-two or fifty-three, one or the other.”

  Keith Lyons, and he was an ex-Met detective remember,
so this can’t have been easy for him, was clearly beginning to have serious doubts about the ethics of taking my money.

  “Andrew, I’m really not sure you wouldn’t be wasting—”

  Suddenly I remembered something from New Rochelle.

  “Wait a minute, I can tell you where she went to school! It was New Rochelle High. And where she went to college – she went to NYU, I saw her graduation picture. There was some little town – it was called, wait a minute, Bamington, or Bingleton, something like that. That any help? Must be. Don’t they always have those year books at schools and things in America?”

  Keith Lyons still looked unconvinced.

  “It’s a long shot. We don’t have her name and they probably wouldn’t release the information even if we had.”

  But a long shot was good enough for me.

  “What sort of money are we talking about here?” I asked eagerly. I could see the cogs whirring behind his eyes; he’d given me every chance hadn’t he? But if I was really determined to open my wallet and let him empty it, what was he supposed to do?

  “£500 a day,” he said. “That’s our standard charge. Say three days work. Not as much as four I shouldn’t think. Plus VAT. Thick end of two grand I suppose, all up.”

  Actually, now that I thought about it, and given Harriet Braintree’s advice about cloth cutting and my accountant’s equally sanguine view of my situation, this wasn’t nothing. But hell, I wasn’t going to stop now. If I abandoned my search for Peggy, if I didn’t have the prospect of finding her to distract me, well then, my immediate future looked a pretty dismal prospect. So, in for a penny, in for the thick end of two grand.

  “Okay,” I said.

  “Okay,” he said, and produced another set of forms for me to sign. Then he said, “Silly me – almost forgot. Don’t suppose you’ve got a photo of – er – this Peggy Lee, have you?”

  “Oh, yes,” I said, “I forgot too. How stupid was that!” And I reached into my pocket and pulled out the Polaroid of Peggy.

  Keith Lyons looked at it.

  “Hmm,” he said, which I assumed was a grunt of approval. “Blimey, I haven’t seen one of these for years. A Polaroid I mean.”